#4 How to find an idea

Welcome to How to Be a Founder, where we'll explore the challenges behind early-stage company building, and I hope support some founders along the way. I'm Matt Clifford, co-founder of Entrepreneur First, and I'm here with my co-founder and now co-author, Alice Bentinck.

Alice, hello.

Hello, Matt. Together, we've worked with thousands of founders to build companies now worth over $10 billion. Over this podcast, and with our newly released book, How to Be a Founder, out now, please do go and buy a copy, we'll be sharing with you the insights and knowledge we've learned while working with real-life early-stage founders on their questions. You can think of us as your startup agony aunt and, um, uncle.

So, sit back, get listening, and we'll try and answer your burning questions on how to be a founder.

So, this week's topic is on how to find the right idea. I'm also here with my new newborn baby, so if you do hear any rumblings or gurglings, I apologise. One of the most common things we hear when talking to prospective founders is, I can't start a company, I don't have any ideas, or even, I don't have the perfect idea. But actually, we think that's one of the biggest myths in entrepreneurship.

I think we strongly believe that the great entrepreneurs aren't people that, you know, are in the shower one day and a light bulb goes on above their heads and suddenly they have this idea that they simply have to turn into reality. In our experience, actually, that way of doing things is actually pretty rare.

Very rare. And I think it's exacerbated by the press. The press wants to position founders as these genius individuals who have these lightbulb moments, but it's a process. And I suppose one of the things that we believe very strongly is it's a teachable process. We've got multiple individuals who have been through EF twice. If you look at the success rates of second-time founders versus first-time founders, You can get better at coming up with ideas. It is a learnable and teachable process, and I think that's really exciting. Now, I think there is a little kind of addendum there, which is, you have to be the sort of person who can come up with ideas.

Mm-hmm.

I think we have had some individuals on EF who have seemed fantastic, but for whatever reason, have lacked the muscle or just haven't built a sufficient muscle yet to even come up with ideas. But I think what we know is true is that you can use a process to get to the best possible idea for you. And I'm not going to say the perfect idea or the the absolute slam dunk idea, because that doesn't exist. But you can use a process to get to the best possible idea for you.

Yeah, and I think there's a bit of nuance here, isn't there? Because I think sometimes when people hear this, particularly people that have been exposed to venture capital before, or in the startup ecosystem, it almost seems obviously stupid, the idea that you would want to be an entrepreneur in the absence of an idea. And I do sort of sympathize with that. I don't think what we're saying, well, I know what we're saying is not, Hey, everyone should be an entrepreneur. Don't worry about the idea. It's just really cool to be an entrepreneur. It's not that at all. It's more that we believe that the idea that is right for you should come out of a deliberate process. And actually the psychology of feeling restless and frustrated with a conventional career, of feeling like you could have unbounded impact, of feeling like You see problems all around you, and you want to fix them in ways that are very hard to do in conventional structures. We do think that is sufficient motivation to then want to say, well, in that case, what is the right thing for me to work on? And I think the reality is, a lot of the examples that people would use of, like, well, this idea was just so important to them, it came out of everything that they always were, every fiber of their being, very often, that's actually a post hoc rationalization of a story. And usually, it's the decision to take plunge. The idea is almost a forcing function for people to take the plunge, and then the true journey of ideation begins.

I think we should just talk about what an idea is. So Entrepreneur First is an idea. It's also a 10-year-old company. Google is an idea, but it's a 30,000-person company. Whatever you came up with in the shower this morning, also an idea. One of the things that we do in the book is talk you through the EF Ideation Framework, which basically breaks down the component parts of an idea. So we don't talk about ideas, we talk about beliefs and how beliefs Beliefs feed into hunches, and how hunches feed into something that can be tested. So, we're not going to go into the framework in detail in the podcast, but I do encourage you, if you are thinking about an idea, to buy a copy of How to Be a Founder and dig into that. So, today we're joined by 2 founders who've already been through a significant part of the ideation process, and have done such a good job that we at EF have already invested in them. They're here today to reflect on the story so far with us, and ask some questions about how their idea might develop in the journey ahead. Ilaf Dayab and Kit Burgess, hello.

Hello. Hi.

Do you want to start just by introducing yourselves and sharing a little bit about the company that you've been building?

Yeah, of course. I'm the co-founder of Meodo. We help companies hire engineers by paying candidates to complete real production work. As background, I studied engineering at uni because I was interested in the combo of business and technology. I built a couple of startups at uni, then went to work at Goldman Sachs on the investment banking side before leaving to start something else. And I spent the past few months at EF working on Mioda.

So, I did maths at Cambridge, then was a data scientist at a startup, Vortexa. I joined at seed, and I left just last year to join Entrepreneur First to start working on our own company. So, I wanted to start a company aged 19 that would never turn anyone down for a job. But didn't know how to make this work. But the question is, to have a meaningful impact, how can this be done at scale? And it turns out, the answer is just to do it. So, at Meodo, we enable software engineers to start working for a new company on tiny paid tasks. So, you get a feel of the new company before changing jobs.

For sure.

You guys, you've been through the ideation process. Tell us, tell us, what questions do you have, or what reflections do you have on the process of going from Strangers who didn't know each other to co-founders, to co-founders with an idea running a startup that's now funded.

Yeah, it's been crazy. We spent the first few weeks speaking to a lot of different people, and then Kit and I had a conversation during lunch over the last few weeks of team building, and it really clicked when he spoke about things that were important to us. For us, it was the shared goal of giving equal opportunity to anyone in the world to learn and earn.

Yeah, so got a question on this one, on finding the right idea. Do you think the question of how to find the right idea could or should be rebranded as how do you find the right problem, given that the idea changes and morphs so much over time?

Alice, that sounds like your area of expertise. I'm gonna send that one.

I think that's an amazing reframing and totally correct. I suppose there's a couple of ways that we would think about this. There is something called problem-based ideation, and I would say that The way that most people think about developing an idea is, how do I find a problem in my day-to-day life that I can solve? Now, we aren't a great fan of problem-based ideation, largely because what happens is everyone ends up solving the same problems. On a day-to-day basis, the kind of people who are building startups are probably experiencing the same problems. I'm hungry, how do I get food faster? I need a flatmate, I wanna go on a better holiday, how do I get a date? And you end up with a bunch of industries that have Huge competition, largely because everyone's trying to solve the same problem. As you may know, having been through the EF process, the way that we think about how to find an idea is to actually think about what are the problems that you are best suited to solve. And we call this thinking about your edge. What's your personal competitive advantage compared to other founders that mean that when you start solving a problem, you're actually the very best, one of the few people in the world who could be exceptional at solving that problem? I think when founders are getting started, they often forget that competition between startups starts from day one. Whatever idea you're working on, wherever you are in the world, someone else will be building the same thing. So, you need to make sure that you have some sort of advantage. Matt and I have been doing this for 10 years now, and we've been investing in startups across 3 continents now for many years. And when we do our investment committees, we probably, about 80% of the ideas we see, we've seen somewhere else, in one of those other continents, being done by equally good founders. It's very rare we actually see truly exceptional ideas. So, ultimately, it does come down to who is the team that is building this idea, and do they have an advantage in solving this particular problem?

Yeah, that kind of leads on to my next question, actually, in terms of having your right to win. So, if you're working on a problem that doesn't actually require specific expertise, whether that's PhD, or kind of tech or IP related, what do you really think gives founders a right to win in that space?

Yeah, I mean, I think this is where founder behaviors are so important. I think often when you look back at people that have won in a space, it's less their expertise in terms of knowledge that explains why they won, and more their founder behaviors. What did they actually do along the way? I think what's interesting, though, is that One of the things that EF allows us a vantage point on that's, I think, quite rare is, as you probably know yourselves, once you get going, it's really easy. And in fact, there's a lot of incentive to mythologize the story of your company, why it was always obvious you were going to start this particular thing. And honestly, I think probably Alice and I have done that ourselves a lot too. One of the things that's really interesting about EF is we get to see those stories in real time as they go and get to see What is actually the process of the various changes and pivots along the way? I think if you take a company like Tractable, today, EF's most valuable company, although you've got plenty of time to catch and beat them, the really interesting thing is what made them win was not some intellectual property or even a tech edge, even though Razvan, the CTO, is an extremely talented computer scientists. It was the belief that the technology that they were exploring was going to change the world in important ways, and being super responsive to feedback from customers, almost like just completely rabid in following whatever hint there was that there was real customer pull. And when I think about why did Tractable succeed, I think it's much more about the hunger, the relentlessness of the founders in making tough choices when faced with difficult feedback than a particular technical edge. To make that really concrete, one story that a lot of people don't know about Tractable, even though at least at EF it's a very well-known story, is when they did what we call investment committee, as in the decision that EF makes after 3 months whether or not to invest, they weren't working on insurance at all. In fact, insurance didn't come until a week before Demo Day. They were working on applying the same technology to evaluating a completely different industrial problem in the oil and gas space. Now, why do I emphasize this? Well, because maybe an oil and gas expert would have stumbled onto the same problem, but it would have actually been really hard for them to pivot out of that problem once they realized that actually the market wasn't big enough and The customers didn't value the problem highly enough. But I think it was Alex and Raz's behaviours as founders that allowed them to take that really tough realisation, think through its full implications, and pivot into something else. And so that's why, even though we look for edge in market and in technical expertise throughout, everyone who joins EF has to have those founder behaviours, because we know that change is inevitable in a startup journey.

I think just building on Matt's point and going back to Kit's opening question, this idea of flexibility around what you're solving. And genuine curiosity around the problem that you're solving is so important. Often, and we talk about this a bit in the book, I don't know if you've heard of this idea of there are missionary founders and there are mercenary founders. And missionary founders are really obsessed by a particular mission that they're trying to solve. Mercenary founders are trying to make lots of money. And the old adage is that you want to, as an investor, back the missionary founders because they will do better, they'll have the resilience, et cetera. I mean, the way that we think about it is, You need to actually be at the intersection of a missionary and mercenary founder. If you're just a missionary about a problem, we find that founders that are just totally obsessed by a problem, they often miss the wood for the trees. They miss the big, interesting problem that's actually just adjacent. They don't fully listen to customer feedback. They don't properly interrogate what the secret might be for their customer. And again, if you're fully mercenary, we find that those founders are less resilient. It's harder for them to raise money, harder for them to hire, et cetera. So, you need to be at the intersection where you're you're interested in finding a commercial problem to solve, one that you can build a business against. That's the mercenary side. But you're also interested in the customer enough that you are actively searching, and seeking out, and curious, and obsessive about the problems that they might have, but you're not attached to one particular problem. I think this goes back to Tractable, or maybe another example would be a company like Accurigs that went through EF, what, 5, 6 years ago, something like that? And it started off being very missionary. They wanted to solve the problem of overprescription of antibiotics. So, how do you stop primary care doctors from prescribing too many antibiotics. They spent probably about 18 months, 2 years, trying to solve that problem, until they realized that actually, having spent so much time with doctors, that wasn't the main problem that needed to be solved. And actually, it was a much, much simpler problem, which was, how can doctors communicate with their patients? So simple that it was, how can doctors send an SMS text message? This is in, like, 2018. How can doctors send an SMS text message to their patients? And on that, they've built now a incredibly valuable Series C business. But it was because they were genuinely curious about their customer. They weren't overly attached to a single problem, and they were seeking out a business model as well. They were seeking out something that people would actually pay for.

So that problem very much developed later on in the company stages. At what point did they pivot towards the text messages?

That was— well, this sort of brings us to another general principle, which I think is really important, which is, I wouldn't fall in love with the problem, but I would fall in love with the customer. So, They pivoted to thinking about the problem they were solving as a communication problem, probably, as Alice said, in early 2018, I think. I'd have to check the exact date. But the point is, as Alice said, that they'd spent a good year-plus really trying to figure out how to solve the antibiotic resistance problem through prescriptions. Now, what was really great about them, and one of the reasons that I still think they're some of the best founders we've ever worked with, is that they were incredibly honest with themselves that they were not getting traction on the kind of idea that they had. But what they never let themselves get distracted from was the people they were actually working with. So the only reason they were able to discover the communications problem, which became the text message product, which today is the core of a lot of what, or at least the starting point of a lot of what they do, was because they'd truly fallen in love with the customer. They just really wanted— they'd spent so much time with doctors, they really wanted to make their lives better. And so the idea of linear ideation that Alice has written about before, and I encourage anyone listening to check out Alice's posts about this, that pivoting doesn't mean going back to a blank whiteboard and being like, what other idea we could work on? It's like saying, given all the resources we have today, intellectual knowledge, capital, whatever it is, what is the next best step that moves us forward in the right direction? That's what they were so good at. They'd fallen in love with the customer. And so actually it wasn't that hard a thing, certainly technically and in terms of the product, to move to the new idea. The thing they had, which is the hard bit, is courage. I think often founders don't want to accept that they've hit a dead end in what they're doing. But I think the way you can get a little— I don't want to pretend it ever gets comfortable, but the way you can get a little more comfortable with it is remembering that hitting a dead end doesn't mean starting from scratch. It means taking what you do know and what you have learned and figuring out what that could be the basis of. And I think that's what Accurics did exceptionally well.

I was going to say, that's an interesting change on the advice you'd hear more often, which is to fall in love with the problem, not the solution. Are you saying instead to fall in love with the customer?

Well, maybe this is, like, just taking— I think it's about, like, what is the right level of abstraction, right? So, I think, don't fall in love with the solution, for sure, because that is assuming away the question of whether or not the solution is right for the customer. So, I think it's definitely better to think about the problem and fall in love with that so that you're open-minded about the solution. However, Sometimes the problem turns out not to be the right problem. But if you are actually passionate about the customer, then it doesn't mean that you have to start from scratch if the problem— So let's just do another minute on Acteryx because I think it's such an instructive example. The reason that they had to do the pivot in the end was that their diagnosis of the problem was kind of wrong. They were right, the meta-problem existed. Antibiotic resistance is a huge problem for for the world. But I think the original idea that this could be— that the problem was how to improve prescription practices in primary care, that wasn't actually the problem. And it was only because they fell in love with the customer that they received the— they didn't even receive the feedback. They figured out that it wasn't the problem. A typical piece of feedback they would get is, the problem is not in prescribing the drugs. The problem is that the patients don't do what we tell them to do. And, you know, you can sort of then see, like, okay, well, maybe we should text them. Maybe we should text them. And then the doctor's like, well, it's actually not trivial to text a patient. And so, I think when you start to look at this example, you see that you've just got to be really open-minded about what you are and aren't trying to do. You've got to have some fixed points. It wouldn't have worked if Jacob and Laurence had turned around and said, maybe we should solve this problem for the fire service, right? Like, they had a fixed point around their customer. But that's what allowed them to evolve their understanding of the problem, and ultimately, the solution.

I mean, I think this feeds back to your earlier point, Matt, about behaviors, in that the best founders are so curious, and often very obsessive. And you really see this at investment committee. So, I mean, Matt, how many startups have we seen at investment committee?

Thousands.

Thousands.

At least 2,000.

At least 2,000 over the last 10 years. Now, There's a very clear distinction between the individuals that come in who are trying to build a startup, and those who are trying to deeply understand their customer. The ones that are trying to build a startup are almost going through the checkbox of, I've done 20 customer interviews, and I've got 40 data points about my customer, and I've got 2 letters of intent. And what they're doing is kind of a startup by numbers. Like, yes, all of those inputs are meant to be useful, but actually, what's the so what? The so what is the founders who are deeply curious and obsessive about their customer, who just really want to understand, like, why does something work that way? Why is it so hard to send a text message? And with the example of Accurics, they actually set up in their office a desk and computer setup that was equivalent to what a doctor would have in a surgery. It was a 10-year-old computer with software that I think we would all gouge our eyes out having to use. But that's the kind of depth of obsession and curiosity they had. And now it's a pretty big company, a very big company, and they've kept that obsession and curiosity about their customer all the way through that growth phase. So, I think, as you think about building your culture, and as you think about ideation, the more that you can be deeply curious, and maintain that curiosity, the more likely it is to build your right to win.

And so, before companies reach product-market fit, when they're still trying to test these different hypotheses that they have, would you suggest that they kind of test in parallel? So, they have all these different ideas, and they work on them at the same time, to prove— to find whichever one Is the best, or do you think they should focus on one at a time, test that, fail fast, and then move on to the next?

I hope we're going to say the same thing, Alice.

It's such a good question, because I think so many people want to know the answer to this. My push would be, go deep on one idea, go really, really deep, and then, when you understand that it isn't going to be viable for whatever reason, pivot and move on to another idea. Now, when I say go deep on an idea, You're basically just trying to gather as much information as possible about whether that idea might work. Now, I think often, and this is maybe going slightly into customer development, but often, the temptation is to say, I found loads of people who have said no, but I only found 3 people that said yes. The key with ideation is to grab onto those people that said yes, and deeply understand them. So, spend as much time as possible with them. Going back to what gets me excited at investment committee, When I find a founder who can talk to me about 2 customers, or 2 potential customers, and can tell me where their budget would come from, what's the biggest problem they have at the moment, where this problem fits in their hierarchy of problems, what does their boss think, like, can really tell a story about their customer, that gets me so excited, because it demonstrates that founder's curiosity and level of understanding. When you get founders come in, and they say, cool, we've got 4 different problems across 4 different industries, and any one of them could be the answer, actually, to me, that shows A lack of stickiness, a lack of curiosity. And ultimately, it will be a slower process because you're not going deep on any one of those problems.

Just a 10-second thought on the psychology of this. Part of the reason that is so important is that unless you've not got an alternative, you will not commit with sufficient focus to actually discovering whether it's the right direction. Because you've always got another option you can try. So, I think it's like, you've got to, in series, go all in, in exactly the same way we recommend finding a co-founder. Don't try multiple co-founders, in series, go all in. Don't be afraid to stop, but you've got to have commitment.

Well, actually, that's a really important point to finish on, that one of the key points of the book and of the EF methodology is this idea that you're not just developing an idea, you're testing a co-founding team at the same time. Now, when you have co-founders that are working on multiple ideas together, Typically, for me, that's an indicator that they probably aren't interested in the same idea. Like, if you asked both of them to, both co-founders, to stack rank those ideas, it probably would end up having each of the co-founders most interested in different ideas. So, the more that you can use the ideation process as a forcing function for testing the team-building process, the better. So, I would encourage, commit to the co-founder, commit to a single idea, and then sequentially go through alternative ideas.

Makes a lot of sense.

Great. Well, thank you so much for joining us. Best of luck with the startup. We're very excited to be investors and can't wait to see what you build.

Great. Thank you very much for having us in.

Thanks so much.

Now we've got a letter from Priya, who is facing probably one of the most relatable problems we see in founders trying to come up with an idea to work on. Matt, I think it is your turn to read this week.

So Priya says, dear Matt and Alice, my colleague Harry and I are currently working together on startup ideas. We work in different departments at redacted to preserve career prospects. I'm an engineer, he's in business development for our advertising arm. We both want to found a company one day and could see our skill sets working well together, so we thought we'd just go for it and try out some ideas. But that's what we're struggling with. We talked about our passions and we found we're both very climate conscious and would love to build something in sustainability. However, I'm conflicted on this. On the one hand, we both care so much about it, I know we'll go 100% on a climate startup, probably more so than anything else we could work on. But on the other, I worry that anything we build could be quite basic and not actually deploy our skills. Harry is the highest performer on his team and he has a really good understanding of advertising sales. Plus, he's always talking about all the gaps he's seen in the market. I have a master's degree in computer vision, and these days spend most of my time on UX design. If we built something close to home, it could be way more advanced and differentiated. So which path should we take? Is there any way we could or should adapt our skill sets to build on our passion? Thank you, Priya. What do you think, Alice?

Oh, I feel like I've read this letter from different people hundreds of times over the last decade. So this is a really typical situation. where there is something that you're deeply interested in, I suppose something that I would call a passion, and then there's something that you're deeply expert in, and that's something that we at EF call your edge. Now, often when people talk about building a startup, they encourage people to work on something that they are passionate about. Now, the reason that we don't do that at EF is that passions can often be very shallow. Now, passions could be something that A passion could be something that you've worked on for decades. A passion could also be something that is a new and fleeting interest. So, we encourage founders to really think about what are the problems, what are the industries where they could have an advantage compared to other founders. Now, focusing on your edge, which is what we encourage at EF, is saying, how have you spent your time over the last decade? Now, if you're 18, it might be that you've spent Most of that time in school, but actually, what are the extracurricular things that you've become really obsessed by? How do you spend your weekends? How do you spend your evenings? If you're at university, what internships have you done? What clubs are you part of? And if you're working, it probably is linked to whatever job you are doing. Building a startup is inherently competitive. There will be other founders somewhere else in the world building the same startup as you, and you really are looking for where you might have an advantage. But it's not just that, it's also about working on something that you do have a degree of resilience to complete. What we find with people who work on passion projects is often when they then commit themselves full-time to it, they actually realize it's not something that they are as deeply interested in as they thought.

Yeah. I also think there's this thing that often gets lost when people think about their passions, which is there's a huge difference between having a passion for something and the actual activity that it will take to build a successful company in the space. I mean, it's a very obvious example, but I think it's worth spending a moment on, which is, take a company like Spotify. We get so many people apply to EF to say they want to work in music. And surprise, surprise, nearly every human being in the world loves music. And that's obviously completely legitimate. But you've got to remember that building a startup in the music space, does not mean listening to music or even making music. Look at what Daniel Ek actually has spent his time on over the last decade. It's been negotiating licensing deals with massive media companies. Obviously, there's more to it than that. I'm doing a caricature, but a passion for music is really a very tiny, tiny part about what it takes to build a company like Spotify. I think being really clear-eyed about What it means to have a passion and what it means to be so fulfilled and energized in your work that you keep going through really tough times is a distinction that's very important to make. And I think if we take Priya's specific example, I wouldn't discourage Priya and Harry at all from thinking about climate, but I think it's really important for them to go a level or a couple of levels deeper on. What does that actually mean? Do they have a hunch about where they could make a difference in climate? Now, for sure, there are companies, ideas that I can think of and that already exist where computer vision could be an important part of solving a big problem in climate. So that could be a way of narrowing the area to explore threads to pull on. But what I don't think is a good idea is to disconnect that from your edges. I think very often the thing that's hardest for people in ideation is starting with a blank sheet of paper. And actually thinking about the right idea for you as being at the intersection of what you think you care enough about to keep doing for a long time, plus what you're really good at, is sensible. I just think it's worth being clear-eyed about what that really means. I mean, Alice and I, we started Entrepreneur First probably largely because of the interest in talent, wanting to help extraordinary people maximize the impact they have in their careers. and their lives. And frankly, that is a big part of what's kept me going over that, uh, over the last 11 years is I really believe in our mission. But today, that's like most of what I do is not work directly with the people going through EF. And I sort of, I, I miss that in some ways. But actually, I think my edge, what I've been really good at over the last decade, is probably more around fundraising and sales. And, and, you know, like actually building a business that allowed me to do that, I think has been key. And so I think it's just really worth separating out these questions. It's not that you should ignore your passions, you should just be realistic about what they actually mean for building a business.

I think just to build on the point you're making about the importance of intersections in ideation, there's a couple here that are worth touching on. One is around this, where does your passion intersect with your edge? And to build on this point about constraints, if you look at any of the academic research around how to generate both quantity and quality of ideas, constraints lead to a greater quantity and quality of idea. The other place where intersection is so important is, as co-founders, if you just sit down and ask yourself the question, looking at our edges, and looking at how they might complement each other, how they might intersect, how they might build on each other, what could we create? And then maybe you layer the climate change space as an extra constraint on top of that. But I often think most of the exciting and truly differentiated ideas that have come out of the Earth, come from 2 founders having that conversation of, okay, well, this is what I can do, this is what I know about. What can you do? What do you know about? And then, how can those 2 things fit together? Because that's often where unusual and differentiated ideas come from. It's that almost serendipity of 2 individuals coming together.

I also think people shouldn't underestimate the ability to develop a passion for what you're doing, because it's what you're doing, and because it's fascinating. Alice, you already used what I think is the key word, which is curiosity. I think we've now worked with hundreds of founders who've ended up working on things that they probably couldn't have imagined working on when they joined EF, but they're so intellectually curious and they're using their edge. There's a fulfillment to doing something you're really good at, but they're deploying that in a direction they couldn't have guessed simply because they kept pulling on a thread. So it's a useful question to say, am I passionate about this? But when I talk to successful entrepreneurs, their passion is in the joy of finding a customer whose problem you're really solving and discovering ways to do that in ways that you couldn't have imagined. And so I think if you're worried about, oh, but will we be motivated? Don't forget how much of that is intrinsic to the act of actually building a company itself.

One important point here is that we see and use edge as a starting point. So, using your edge is about saying, okay, well, this is where I'm going to start, and this is where I already have an advantage in knowledge or skills, this is where I'm going to start. But actually, when you look at some of our most successful founders, many of them have ended up sort of— they started with their edge, but as the idea has developed over time, Actually, there isn't necessarily as clear a link. So, your edge is not a cage that you'll never break out of. Your edge is a starting point to help provide that constraint, clarify what you can provide to the ideation process alongside your co-founder. But it's really just to get you going. It's not something that you should slavishly follow for the rest of your startup's life.

I think one of the things that I reflect on as we think about both the conversation that we had earlier with Elaf and Kit, but also thinking through the letter from Priya, is we talk a lot at EF about how one of the reasons to take the plunge is you can't possibly know whether you have what it takes. You can't possibly know if you're ready to start a company until you start. And I think that same idea translates pretty well to thinking about ideas. It's really weird to imagine that ideas are sort of business plans, that they exist somewhere on a piece of paper written down, and to start a company means having a good idea. Actually, these are really dynamic things that change through the act of getting started. And so although it might sound really controversial to say, We think that you can decide to be an entrepreneur before you know what your idea is. I think what we're really reflecting there is the dynamic nature of entrepreneurship, the fact that it is a discovery process, the fact that for the right people, it's a constantly moving journey sparked by curiosity and learning. And so, I kind of feel that's the common theme across a lot of what we talked about, is that people have to ignore the static view of ideas here. There's no such thing. And you already said, entrepreneur first, an idea, and it's 10 years old. Yeah.

fold.

And I think you and I would say, the idea that we're working on even today feels really different from the idea that we were working on a year ago. Now, obviously, there's a continuity, it'd be weird, but this is not something you'll ever settle, right?

Well, I hope that, going back to the opening question that we were saying at the beginning, we know that lots of people don't become a founder because they don't have the right, perfect idea. I hope that what people will take away from this episode is that the The process of developing an idea never ends. We talked about Tractable, we talked about Accurates. Accurates, it took them a couple of years to get to the idea, and idea in quotation marks, that then became the foundation for their business. But that idea is still evolving, and developing, and changing. And I suppose the point I'd highlight is the point that you were making, Matt, around behaviors, and how so much of being a founder is about behaviors. And it's not behaviors that you just use on day 1, it's behaviors that will see you through the— the decade-long journey, decade-plus-long journey, to go from a fledgling pre-seed company to something that is ready to IPO, ready to exit, a globally important company, whatever you want to call it. So, I hope that if you're listening to this, and you're wondering if you do have what it takes, you focus on the behaviors that we've talked about, rather than on evaluating whatever very nascent idea you had in the shower this morning.

Absolutely. Thank you for listening to How to Be a Founder, To take a deeper dive into the topics we discussed today and more, take a look at our book, How to Be a Founder. It's out now and available online and in bookshops.

We have also put together a website called howtobeafounder.com, which has even more resources on fundraising, including practical documents that you can download and take a look at. So do check out howtobeafounder.com.

Co-Fruition. Co-Fruition.